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FILE --In this Aug. 26, 1994 file photo, Cuban refugees float in heavy seas 60 miles south of Key West, Fla. In the 20 years since Fidel Castro set off a high-seas humanitarian crisis by encouraging an exodus of 35,000 islanders, more than 26,000 other Cubans have risked their lives crossing the Florida Straits. Already this year, nearly 3,000 have been picked up by U.S. authorities, on a pace to double last year’s total. Experts say it shows the limits of the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy that solved the 1994 crisis. (AP Photo/Dave Martin, File)

Miami, FL--There are over 1.1 million Cuban immigrants in the United States, and even more than other immigrant groups, they have clustered, with over two-thirds living in greater Miami. What unites this group is not dislike of their home country, but the need to leave the Castro brothers’ Communist regime. Without the money or legal ability to fly out, however, many have risked their lives by floating on man-made rafts to Florida, Mexico and elsewhere. Thousands of these raft people—or “balseros”—are traversing the streets of Miami, carrying a memory that is seldom-discussed in Cuban culture. But I recently lived there, and found one balsero willing to tell his story.

This connection came through being a Forbes columnist. I was interviewing a Miami-based Cuban-American developer named Carlos Fausto Miranda, for a story on local regulatory policy. I mentioned that I also wanted to write about Miami’s balseros, and he said he could find me one. I followed up on his offer several months later, and he began looking. It turned out that his high school wrestling coach, in a journey profiled by the Miami Herald in 1997, had nearly died escaping Cuba 25 years ago. Carlos wasn’t in town, but scheduled an interview with this coach, and asked an old teammate, Ivan Agustin Enriquez, to translate.

So late one October morning, Ivan and I drove out to nearby Hialeah, America’s most Cuban city by percentage, to meet Fidel Albelo. We rolled deep into a residential area defined by cheap single-family housing, entered a driveway, and knocked on a side door. We were greeted by a short, stocky, affable 56-year-old man. The former player and coach embraced one another in Spanish—Albelo’s only language—and he led us into a small apartment dominated by trophies and team photos.

Over the next 4 hours, Albelo detailed, often through tears, his early life in Cuba, his near-death escape, and the life he has since built in Miami. What we learned was that escaping Cuba is not only dangerous, but by forcing a transition between such radically different societies, emotionally chaotic.

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January 1, 1959, is an infamous day in Cuba’s history. That was when Fidel Castro’s revolutionary army, which had spent several years battling Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship, took power. That next day, Fidel Albelo was born, to a family that sympathized with the revolution.

Albelo was born in Cardenas, a 100,000-person city 97 miles east of the capital Havana. His parents lived off combined earnings of $20/month, with the father as a taxi driver, and the mother as a school assistant. His house was, at about 300 square feet, smaller than his current apartment, or a Manhattan micro-unit—and accommodated 9 people, including his parents, his 5 brothers, and a sister.

Because living quarters were so cramped, Albelo attended a boarding school at age 7 that specialized in sports, and remained there until age 19, growing into a top-level amateur wrestler. But when it came time to travel for international wrestling competitions—which was seen as a path to a lucrative professional career—Albelo’s parents axed the plan.

“I competed in trials for the national circuit, and was chosen,” he said. “But to participate would have obliged me to enter fully into state custody and study in the Soviet Union, which my parents forbade since I was but a child.”

Albelo’s other option was to remain in Cuba and pursue intercollegiate wrestling and studies. But this would keep him in poverty, so he began scheming with some friends about escaping.

Nowadays in Cuba, citizens can travel internationally, thanks to reforms made by Fidel Castro’s relatively benevolent brother, Raul, who has ruled since 2008. But for the revolution’s first few decades, leaving the island was, like so many other basic rights, a crime. This meant anyone who escaped—or who talked about it, assisted someone else, or collected rafting materials—was subject to one to ten years in prison.

In 1980, several years into this planning and scavenging process, Albelo’s group got arrested, when one friend who’d grown scared ratted everyone out. Albelo was immediately viewed as traitorous by his parents, blacklisted from jobs, and thrown for a year in prison. He spent that time in a 200-foot cell with 5 other men, one open toilet, and a 2-hour weekly time block for viewing the sun—inhumane conditions that spurred violence among prisoners and guards.

The paradox of Cuba’s government, however, is that despite its brutality, it manages the occasional pretense of compassion. For otherwise tormented prisoners, this meant providing study areas that enabled some to finish their educations. Albelo thus left prison in 1982, Physical Education degree in hand, and recharged his life.

When asked whether he remains bitter towards Castro for the prison sentence, Albelo answered no. The real problem, he explained, were those who worked under Castro—such as the network of neighborhood spies who uphold communism, called the CDR—and trying to blame the president would be like “blaming Obama for a corrupt police officer in Miami.” But he did acknowledge that Castro’s Communist system was engineered to foster abuses of power.